Bahrain Is Still a Miserable, Vicious Dictatorship, By the Way

Tired of the confusing and equivocal news from our war in LIbya? (Front of today’s New York Times: “Top Libyan Official Defects; Rebels Are Retreating.”) Try Bahrain. It’s still very simple: our
loyal Bahraini allies
are continuing to ruthlessly smash the protest movement there.

More than
300 people have been detained
since the middle of this month. This week, Bahrain’s foreign minister accused the protesters of being agitators covertly backed by Hezbollah.

who were seeking treatment for injuries suffered during the protests. One patient, with more than 100 pellet wounds from birdshot, was removed from the hospital where he was waiting for emergency abdominal surgery and taken away in an unmarked vehicle to a military hospital instead. Another patient with pellet wounds died at the same military hospital after being transferred there by “masked police officers.”

A patient who had suffered pellet wounds to the face told Human Rights Watch about how people injured in the protests were separated from other patients:

around 4 or 5 p.m. the hospital transferred him and many of the others who had protest-related injuries to Ward 62, on the sixth floor. He said that from that evening through early the next morning, several groups of men, some in uniforms and others in civilian clothes, most of them masked, entered their room and repeatedly interrogated them on videotape, demanding to know about alleged relationships with opposition figures, Iran, and Hezbollah. The men used anti-Shia slurs against the patients. He said at one point one of the men told the others to beat them with their shoes because they were “najes,” or unclean, and the men beat the patients on their heads, hands, and necks.

“We hope that the Bahraini government’s decision to arrest bloggers and Internet activists will not make it more difficult to resume a national dialogue that solicits the views and opinions of all Bahrainis.”

Yes, America is hoping Bahrain will have a national dialogue. That is how very, very tough and serious we are about confronting the dictatorship there.

UPDATE: Mahmood Al Yousif just phoned the AP to report that
he had been released
. (Also the AP says his arrest happened Wednesday, where Time reported it as Tuesday.)